7
How Obama Really Did It SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY HELPED BRING HIM TO THE BRINK OF THE PRESIDENCY By DAVID TALBOT oeTrippi, Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign man- ager and Internet impresario, describes Super Tuesday II- the March 4 primaries in Texas, Ohio, Vermont, and Rhode Island-as the moment Barack Obama used social tech- nology to decisive effect. The day's largest hoard of delegates would be contested in Texas, where a strong showing would require exceptional discipline and voter-education efforts. In Texas, Dem- ocrats vote first at the polls and then, if they choose, again at cau- cuses after the polls close. The caucuses award one-third of the Democratic delegates. Hillary Clinton's camp had about 20,000 volunteers at work in Texas. But in an e-mail, Trippi learned that I04,Ooo Texans had joined Obama's social-networkingsite, www.my.barackobama.com, known as MyBO. MyBO and the main Obama site had already logged their share of achievements, particularly in helping rake in cash. The month before, the freshman senator from Illinois had set a record in American politics by garnering $55 million in donations in a single month. In Texas, MyBO also gave the Obama team the instant capacity to wage fully networked campaign war- fare. After seeing the volunteer numbers, Trippi says,"I remember saying, 'Game, match-it's over.'" The Obama campaign could get marching orders to the Texans registered with MyBO with minimal effort. The MyBO databases could slice and dice lists of volunteers by geographic microregion and pair people with appropriate tasks, includingprepping nearby voters on caucus procedure. "You could go online and download the names, addresses, and phone numbers of ioo people inyour neigh- borhood to get out and vote-or the 40 people on your block who were undecided," Trippi says. "'Here is the leaflet: print it out and get it to them.' It was you, at your computer, in your house, printing and downloading. They did it all very well." Clinton won the Texas primary vote 51 to 47 percent. But Obama's people, following their MyBO playbook, so overwhelmed the chaotic, crowded caucuses that he scored an overall victory in the Texas delegate count, 99 to 94. His showing nearly canceled out Clinton's win that day in Ohio. Clinton lost her last major opportunity to stop the Obama juggernaut. "In 1992, Carville said,'It's the economy, stupid,"' Trippi says, recalling the exhortation of Bill Clinton's campaign manager, James Carville. "This year, it was the network, stupid!" Throughout the political season, the Obama campaign has domi- nated new media, capitalizing on a confluence of trends. Americans are more able to access media-rich content online; 55 percent have broadband Internet connections at home, double the figure for spring 2004. Social-networking technologies have matured, and more Americans are comfortable with them. Although the 2004 Dean campaign broke ground with its online meeting technologies and blogging, "people didn't quite have the facility," says Lawrence Photographs by PORTER GIFFORD 78 FEATURE STORY

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How ObamaReally Did ItSOCIAL TECHNOLOGY HELPED BRINGHIM TO THE BRINK OF THE PRESIDENCY

By DAVID TALBOT

oeTrippi, Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign man-ager and Internet impresario, describes Super Tuesday II-the March 4 primaries in Texas, Ohio, Vermont, and RhodeIsland-as the moment Barack Obama used social tech-

nology to decisive effect. The day's largest hoard of delegates wouldbe contested in Texas, where a strong showing would requireexceptional discipline and voter-education efforts. In Texas, Dem-ocrats vote first at the polls and then, if they choose, again at cau-cuses after the polls close. The caucuses award one-third of theDemocratic delegates.

Hillary Clinton's camp had about 20,000 volunteers at work inTexas. But in an e-mail, Trippi learned that I04,Ooo Texans hadjoined Obama's social-networkingsite, www.my.barackobama.com,known as MyBO. MyBO and the main Obama site had alreadylogged their share of achievements, particularly in helping rakein cash. The month before, the freshman senator from Illinoishad set a record in American politics by garnering $55 million indonations in a single month. In Texas, MyBO also gave the Obamateam the instant capacity to wage fully networked campaign war-fare. After seeing the volunteer numbers, Trippi says,"I remembersaying, 'Game, match-it's over.'"

The Obama campaign could get marching orders to the Texansregistered with MyBO with minimal effort. The MyBO databasescould slice and dice lists of volunteers by geographic microregionand pair people with appropriate tasks, includingprepping nearbyvoters on caucus procedure. "You could go online and download thenames, addresses, and phone numbers of ioo people inyour neigh-borhood to get out and vote-or the 40 people on your block whowere undecided," Trippi says. "'Here is the leaflet: print it out and

get it to them.' It was you, at your computer, in your house, printingand downloading. They did it all very well." Clinton won the Texasprimary vote 51 to 47 percent. But Obama's people, following theirMyBO playbook, so overwhelmed the chaotic, crowded caucusesthat he scored an overall victory in the Texas delegate count, 99to 94. His showing nearly canceled out Clinton's win that day inOhio. Clinton lost her last major opportunity to stop the Obamajuggernaut. "In 1992, Carville said,'It's the economy, stupid,"' Trippisays, recalling the exhortation of Bill Clinton's campaign manager,James Carville. "This year, it was the network, stupid!"

Throughout the political season, the Obama campaign has domi-nated new media, capitalizing on a confluence of trends. Americansare more able to access media-rich content online; 55 percent havebroadband Internet connections at home, double the figure forspring 2004. Social-networking technologies have matured, andmore Americans are comfortable with them. Although the 2004

Dean campaign broke ground with its online meeting technologiesand blogging, "people didn't quite have the facility," says Lawrence

Photographs by PORTER GIFFORD78 FEATURE STORY

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Lessig, a Stanford law professorwho has given the Obama campaignIntemetpolicy advice (Lessigwrote "The People Own Ideas!" in ourMay/June 2005 issue, available on technologyreview.com). "The

world has now caught up with the technology." The Obama cam-paign, he adds, recognized this early: 'The key networking advancein the Obama field operation was really deploying community-building tools in a smart way from the very beginning."

Of course, many ofthe 2008 candidates had websites, click-to-donate tools, and social-networking features-even John McCain,who does not personally use e-mail. But the Obama team put such

technologies at the center of its campaign-among other things,recruiting 24-year-old Chris Hughes, cofounder of Facebook, tohelp develop them. And it managed those tools well. Supportershad considerable discretion to use MyBO to organize on theirown; the campaign did not micromanage but struck a balance

between top-down control and anarchy. In short, Obama, the for-

mer Chicago community organizer, created the ultimate online

political machine.

VVEB J )CIKEY Jascha Franklin-Hodge, the 29-year-old cofounder andchief technology officer of Blue State Digital, the company behind Obama'ssocial technologies, says that "on every metric, this campaign has operatedon a scale that has exceeded what was done before" Beyond fund-raising,the Web tools enabled event planning, phone banks, and targeted e-mailing.

The Obama campaign did not provide access or interviews forthis story; it only confirmed some details of our reporting andoffered written comments. This story is based on interviews with

third parties involved in developing Obama's social-networking

strategy or who were familiar with it, and on public records.

AN ONLINE NERVOUS SYSTEM

A row of elegant, renovated i9 th-century industrial buildings lines

Boston's Congress Street east of Fort Point Channel. On any given

day, behind a plain wooden door on the third floor of 37 4 Congress,

15 to 20 casually clad programmers tap away at computers. On theday I visited, the strains ofCreedence Clearwater Revival filled theroom; a Ping-Pong table dominated the small kitchen. This is the

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technology centerfor Blue State Digital,whichmeans that it is also the nervous system for itstwo largest clients, the Barack Obama cam-paign and the Democratic National Commit-tee. Founded by alumni of the Dean campaign,Blue State Digital added interactive elementsto Obama's website-including MyBO-andnow tends to its daily care and feeding. Thesite's servers hum away in a Boston suburband are backed up in the Chicago area.

JaschaFranklin-Hodge,2 9 ,greetedmewitha friendly handshake and a gap-toothed grin.He has a deep voice and a hearty laugh; his faceis ringed by a narrow beard. Franklin-Hodgedropped out of MIT after his freshmanyear and spent a fewyears inonline music startups before runningthe Intemet infrastructure forthe Dean campaign, which received a then-unprecedented $27 mil-lion in online donations. "When the campaign ended, we thought,'Howard Dean was not destined to be president, but what we aredoing online-this is too big to let go away,'" he says. He and threeothers cofounded Blue State Digital, where he is chief technologyofficer. (Another cofounder, Joe Rospars, is now on leave with theObama campaign as its new-media director.)

The MyBO tools are, in essence, rebuilt and consolidated ver-sions of those created for the Dean campaign. Dean's websiteallowed supporters to donate money, organize meetings, and dis-tribute media, says Zephyr Teachout, who was Dean's Internetdirector and is now a visiting law professor at Duke University. "Wedeveloped all the tools the Obama campaign is using: SMS [textmessaging], phone tools, Web capacity," Teachout recalls. "They[Blue State Digital] did a lot of nice work in taking this crude setof unrelated applications and making a complete suite."

Blue State Digital had nine days to add its tools to Obama'ssite before the senator announced his candidacy on February10, 2007, in Springfield, IL. Among other preparations, the teambraced for heavy traffic."We made some projections oftraffic levels,contribution amounts, and e-mail levels based on estimates fromfolks who worked with [John] Kerry and Dean in 2oo4," recallsFranklin-Hodge. As Obama's Springfield speech progressed, "wewere watching the traffic go up and up, surpassing all our previousrecords." (He would not provide specific numbers.) It was clearthat early assumptions were low. "We blew through all of those[estimates] in February," he says. "So we had to do a lot of workto make sure we kept up with the demand his online success hadplaced on the system." By July 20o8, the campaign had raised morethan $200 million from more than a million online donors (Obamahad raised $340 million from all sources by the end of June), andMyBO had logged more than a million user accounts and facili-tated 75,000 local events, according to Blue State Digital.

MyBO and the main campaign site made it easy to give money-the fuel for any campaign, because it pays for advertising and staff.Visitors could use credit cards to make one-time donations or tosign up for recurring monthly contributions. MyBO also made giv-ing money a social event: supporters could set personal targets, runtheir own fund-raising efforts, and watch personal fund-raisingthermometers rise. To bring people to the site in the first place,the campaign sought to make Obama a ubiquitous presence onas many new-media platforms as possible.

The viral Internet offered myriad ways to propagate unfilteredObama messages. The campaign posted the candidate's speechesand linked to multimedia material generated by supporters. Amusic video set to an Obama speech-"Yes We Can," by the hip-hop artist Will.i.am-has been posted repeatedly on YouTube, butthe top two postings alone have been viewed io million times. Asingle YouTube posting of Obama's March i8 speech on race hasbeen viewed more than four million times. Similarly, the cam-paign regularly sent out text messages (at Obama rallies, speakersfrequently asked attendees to text their contact information to hiscampaign) and made sure that Obama was prominent on other

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW SEPTEMBER /OCTOBER 200880 FEATURE STORY

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YES, VVE NETWO/3"-K After Hillary Clinton suspended her campaign,Barack Obama's campaign e-mailed members of its social-networking siteexhorting them to hold "Unite for Change" parties on June 28. More than4,000 parties-arranged by supporters using the Obama site-were orga-nized in days; these are scenes from three such parties in the Boston area.The Obama site has helped volunteers organize more than 75,000 events.

social-networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace (see "New-Media King,"p. 82). The campaign even used the microbloggingservice Twitter, garnering about 50,00o Obama "followers" whotrack his short posts. "The campaign, consciously or unconsciously,became much more ofa media operation than simply a presidentialcampaign, because they recognized that by putting their messageout onto these various platforms, their supporters would spread itfor them," says Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal DemocracyForum, a website covering the intersection ofpolitics and technol-

ogy (and another Dean alumnus). "We are going from the era of thesound bite to the sound blast."

Money flowed in, augmenting the haul from big-ticket fund-raisers. By the time of the Iowa caucuses on January 3, 2oo8, theObama campaign had more than $35 million on hand and was ableto use MyBO to organize and instruct caucus-goers. "They havedone a great job in being precise in the use of the tools," Teachoutsays."In Iowa it was house parties, looking for a highly committedlocal network. In South Carolina, it was a massive get-out-the-vote

effort." MyBO was critical both in the early caucus states, wherecampaign staff was in place, and in later-voting states like Texas,Colorado, and Wisconsin, where "we provided the tools, remotetraining, and opportunity for supporters to build the campaignon their own," the Obama campaign told Technology Review in awritten statement. "When the campaign eventually did deploy staff

to these states, they supplemented an already-built infrastructureand volunteer network."

Using the Web, the Obama camp turbocharged age-old campaign

tools. Take phone banks: through MyBO, the campaign choppedup the task of making calls into thousands of chunks small enoughfor a supporter to handle in an hour or two."Millions ofphone calls

were made to early primary states by people who used the website toreach out and connect with them," Franklin-Hodge says. "On everymetric, this campaign has operated on a scale that has exceeded

what has been done before. We facilitate actions of every sort: send-ing e-mails out to millions and millions of people, organizing tens ofthousands of events." The key, he says, is tightly integrating onlineactivity with tasks people can perform in the real world. "Yes, thereare blogs and Listservs," Franklin-Hodge says. "But the point ofthecampaign is to get someone to donate money, make calls, write let-ters, organize a house party. The core of the software is havingthoselinks to taking action-to doing something."

PORK INVADERS

Ifthe other major candidates had many ofthe same Web tools, theirexperiences show that having them isn't enough: you must makethem central to the campaign and properly manage the networksof supporters they help organize. Observers say that Clinton'scampaign deployed good tools but that online social networksand new media weren't as big a part of its strategy; at least in itsearly months, it relied more on conventional tactics like big fund-raisers. After all, Clinton was at the top of the party establishment.

"They [the Obama supporters] are chanting Yes we can,' and she's

saying'I don't need you,"' Trippi says. "That is what the top of thatcampaign said by celebrating Terry McAuliffe [the veteran politi-cal operative and former Democratic National Committee chair-

man] and how many millions he could put together with big, bigchecks. She doesn't need my $25!" The two campaigns' fund-raisingstatistics support Trippi's argument: 48 percent ofObama's fundscame from donations ofless than $2oo, compared with 33 percentof Clinton's, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Clinton's Internet director, Peter Daou, credits the Obamacampaign with doing an "amazing job" with its online socialnetwork. "If there is a difference in how the two campaignsapproached [a Web strategy], a lot of those differences were basedon our constituencies," Daou says. "We were reaching a differentdemographic of supporters and used our tools accordingly." Forexample, he says, the Clinton campaign established a presence on

the baby-boomer social-networking site Eons.com, and Clintonherself often urged listeners to visit www.hillaryclinton.com. ButAndrew Rasiej says that the conventional political wisdom ques-tioned the value of the Internet. "As far as major political circleswere concerned," he says, "Howard Dean failed, and thereforethe Internet didn't work."

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While it's hard to tease out how much Clinton's loss was due toher Web strategy-and how much to factors such as her Iraq Warvote and the half-generation difference between her and Obama'sages-it seems clear that her campaign deEmphasized Web strategyearly on, Trippi says. Even ifyou "have all the smartest bottom-up,tech-savvy people working for you," he says, "ifthe candidate andthe top of the campaign want to run a top-down campaign, thereis nothing you can do. It will sit there and nothing will happen.That's kind of what happened with the Clinton campaign."

Republican Ron Paul had a different problem: Internet anarchy.Where the Obama campaign built one central network and man-aged it effectively, the Paud campaign decided early on that it wouldessentiallybe a hub for whatever networks the organizers were set-tingup. The results were mixed. On the one hand, volunteers orga-nized successful "money bombs"-one-day online fund-raisingfrenzies (the one on November 5, 20o7, netted Paul $4.3 million).But sometimes the volunteers' energy-and money-was wasted,says Justine Lam, the Paul campaign's Internet director, who isnow the online marketing director at Politicker.com. Consider thesupporter-driven effort to hire a blimp emblazoned with "Who isRon Paul? Google Ron Paul" to cruise up and down the East Coastlast winter. "We saw all this money funding a blimp, and thought,"We really need this money for commercials,'" Lam says.

Then there is McCain, who-somewhat ironically-was the bigInternet story of2ooo. That year, after his New Hampshire pri-mary victory over George W. Bush, he quickly raised $i milliononline. And at times last year, he made effective use of the Inter-net. His staff made videos-such as "Man in the Arena," celebrat-ing his wartime service-that gained popularity on YouTube. Butthe McCain site is ineffectual for social networking. In late June,

when I tried to sign up on McCainSpace-the analogue to MyBO-I got error messages. When I tried again, I was informed that Iwould soon get a new password in my in-box. It never arrived. "Hissocial-networking site was poorly done, and people found therewas nothing to do on it," says Lam. "It was very insular, a walledgarden. You don't want to keep people inside your walled garden;you want them to spread the message to new people."

McCain's organization is playing to an older base of support-ers. But it seems not to have grasped the breadth of recent shiftsin communications technology, says DavidAll, a Republican new-media consultant. "You have an entire generation of folks underage 25 no longer using e-mails, not even using Facebook; a majorityare using text messaging," All says. "I get Obama's text messages,and every one is exactly what it should be. It is never pointless, itis always worth reading, and it has an action for you to take. Youcan have hundreds of recipients on a text message. You have hun-dreds of people trying to change the world in i6o characters or less.What's the SMS strategy for John McCain? None."

The generational differences between the Obama and McCaincampaigns may be best symbolized by the distinctly retro "PorkInvaders," a game on the McCain site (it's also a Facebook appli-cation) styled after Space Invaders, the arcade game of the late1970s. Pork Invaders allows you to fire bullets that say "veto" atslow-moving flying pigs and barrels.

But it's not that the campaign isn't trying to speak to the youthof today, as opposed to the youth of decades ago. Lately McCainhas been having his daughter Meghan and two friends write a

"bloggette" from the campaign trail. The bloggette site features asilhouette ofa fetchingwoman in red high-heeled shoes."It givesa hipper, younger perspective on the campaign and makes both of

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW SEPTEMBER /OCTOBER 2008

Barack Obama's website enjoys more hits than the competition's, but his real dominance is onNEW-ME DIA K I N G social networks like Facebook and MySpace. He's also a leading microblogger on Twitter.

MySpace "friends" Facebook supporters Weekly website traffic

400thousand 1.25 million 1.25 million'07 ''0s '070' '07'0

300 1.00 1.00

0.75 0.75200-

0.50 0.50

100 0.25 - 0.25-

Jan. 31 A IJuly Oct Jan. lApr. July30 May21 IJuly I Oct Jan. IApr. Jly0 Jan. 6 ct an. Ar. ly2

U Barack Obama U John McCain U Mike Gravel U Ralph Nader,, Hillary Clinton

82 FEATURE STORY

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In 1992, James Carville, Bill Clinton's campai chief, famouslyexhorted his staff, "It's the economy, stupid!" Thisyear, "It's thenetwork, stupid!" says Joe Trippi, manager of Howard Dean's2004 campaign, which midwifed Barack Obama's Web tools.

her parents seem hipper and younger," says Julie Germany, direc-tor of the nonpartisan Institute for Politics, Democracy, and theInternet at George Washington University. The McCain campaigndid not reply to several interview requests, but Germany predictsthat the campaign will exploit social networking in time to makea difference in November. "What we will see is that the McCainonline campaign is using the Internet just as effectively to meetits goals as the Obama campaign," she says. Over the summer, theMcCain campaign refreshed its website. But Rasiej, for one, doubtsthat McCain has enough time to make up lost ground.

A NETWORKED WHITE HOUSE?

The obvious next step for MyBO is to serve as a get-out-the-voteengine in November. All campaigns scrutinize public records show-ing who is registered to vote and whether they have voted in pastelections. The Obama campaign will be able to merge this data withMyBO data. All MyBO members' activity will have been chroni-cled: every house party they attended, each online connection, thedate and amount of each donation. Rasiej sees how it might playout: the reliable voters who signed up on MyBO but did little elsemay be left alone. The most active ones will be deployed to get theunreliable voters-whether MyBO members or not-to the polls.And personalized pitches can be dished up, thanks to the MyBOdatabase. "The more contextual information they can provide thefield operation, the better turnout they will have," he says.

IfObama is elected, his Web-oriented campaign strategy couldcarry over into his presidency. He could encourage his support-ers to deluge members of Congress with calls and e-mails, or usethe Web to organize collective research on policy questions. Thecampaign said in one of its prepared statements that "it's certainthat the relationships that have been built between Barack Obamaand his supporters, and between supporters themselves, will notend on Election Day." But whether or not a President Obama takesMyBO into the West Wing, it's clear that the phenomenon willforever transform campaigning. "We're scratching the surface,"Trippi says. "We're all excited because he's got one million people

signed up-but we are 300 million people in this country. We arestill at the infancy stages ofwhat social-networking technologies

* Hear the CTO of Blue State Digital explain the origins andworkings of Barack Obama's social-networking website:technologyreview.com/obama

are going to do, not just in our politics but in everything. Therewon't be any campaign in 2012 that doesn't try to build a socialnetwork around it."

Lessig warns that if Obama wins but doesn't govern accordingto principles of openness and change, as promised, supporters maynot be so interested in serving as MyBO foot soldiers in 2012. "Thething they [the Obama camp] don't quite recognize is how muchof their enormous support comes from the perception that this issomeone different," Lessig says."If they behave like everyone else,how much will that stanch the passion of his support?"

But for now, it's party time. At the end of June, after Clinton sus-pended her campaign, MyBO put out a call for the faithful to orga-nize house parties under a "Unite for Change" theme. More than4,ooo parties were organized nationwide on June 28; I logged inand picked three parties from about a dozen in the Boston area.

My first stop was a house party in the tony suburb ofWinchester,where several couples dutifully watched an Obama-supplied cam-paign video. Host Mary Hart, an art professor in her 5 Os, said thatObama and his website made her "open my house to strangers andreally get something going." She added, "I'm e-mailing people Ihaven't seen in 20 years. We have this tremendous ability to usethis technology to network with people. Why don't we use it?"

Next stop was a lawn party in the Boston neighborhood ofRoxbury, whose organizer, Sachielle Samedi, 34, wore a buttonthat said"Hot Chicks Dig Obama." She said that support for theObama candidacy drew neighbors together. At the party, WayneDudley, a retired history professor, met a kindred spirit: BrianMurdoch, a 54-year-old Episcopal priest. The two men button-holed me for several minutes; Dudley predicted that Obama wouldbring about "a new world order centered on people of integrity."Murdoch nodded vigorously. It was a fine MyBO moment.

My evening ended at a packed post-collegiate party in a Somer-ville walk-up apartment. Host Rebecca Herst, a 23-year-old pro-gram assistant with the Jewish Organizing Initiative, said thatMyBO-unlike Facebook-allowed her to quicklyupload her entireGmail address book, grafting her network onto Obama's. "It willbe interesting to see what develops after this party, because nowI'm connected to all these people," she shouted over the growingdin. Two beery young men, heading for the exits, handed her two

checks for $20. Herst tucked the checks into her back pocket. fl

DAVID TALBOT IS TECHNOLOGY REVIEWS CHIEF CORRESPONDENT

FEATURE STORY 83WWW.TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM

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TITLE: How Obama Really Did ItSOURCE: Technol Rev (1998) 111 no5 S/O 2008

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